


New Vid!  Roseability - Angel/Spike

by luminosity



Category: Angel: the Series
Genre: F/M, Meta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-02-23
Updated: 2006-02-23
Packaged: 2017-12-05 06:51:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,518
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/720105
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luminosity/pseuds/luminosity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Neologism coined by Idlewild in the song "Roseability," in reference to Gertrude Stein's observation that "a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose."  Definition: Able to rose.</p>
    </blockquote>





	New Vid!  Roseability - Angel/Spike

**Author's Note:**

> Neologism coined by Idlewild in the song "Roseability," in reference to Gertrude Stein's observation that "a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose." Definition: Able to rose.

Or, The Cup of Perpetual Torment just served to bring it all up to the surface.

Roseability: noun. [<rose + -ability.] Note: Neologism coined by Idlewild in the song "Roseability," in reference to Gertrude Stein's observation that "a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose." Definition: Able to rose.

Yeah, make of that what you will.

Download: My site is still under construction. If you would like to download this vid, please email me. Thank you.

Thank you, as always, to [](http://elynross.livejournal.com/profile)[**elynross**](http://elynross.livejournal.com/) for betaing and listening to me go on and on, and finally buying it. Thank you, [](http://absolutedestiny.livejournal.com/profile)[**absolutedestiny**](http://absolutedestiny.livejournal.com/), for the context-free viewing and criticism. I appreciate your comments very much. Also, much thanks to my friends who cheered me on. Y'all know who you are, and I love you guys.

I was thinking of dedicating this vid to any number of Angel/Spike fans (you know who you are!), but I think? This one is for me. :) With love. [dies laughing]

Feedback is always appreciated!

Long ramble about Roseability, Gertrude Stein, and Angel and Spike

When I talk about Roseability, I really talk about Angel and Spike. And it feels really good!!

All episode quotations are from Buffy vs. Angel Episode Guides and Transcripts

I first heard Roseability around four years ago, I think. Immediately, I put it in my vidding directory. I couldn't find anything that applied to it, because, if you know the lyrics*, nothing really *can* apply to it outside of the thing itself; therefore, just about anything could apply to it. Then I started thinking about Gertrude Stein, what I knew of her, started reading. A thing is what it is (what it is, what it is), her circular and sometimes infuriating, sing-song way of stating the obvious--which really isn't obvious at all, because we never really know what another person *is* or *means*.

And then I started thinking about Angel and Spike. How, from the beginning, they've been intertwined. Wherever Angel goes Spike follows, from the first thrusting of his hand into sunlight, to Sunnydale, to Buffy, to ensoulment, to LA. And it followed that Spike would ultimately follow his (sire/rival/enemy/brother/yoda/bloody poof/date) to redemption, to his/their destiny. The rub along the way is that Spike is Spike and Angel is Angel, and theirs has never been an easy alliance.

On one level, the vid is all about Destiny. The episode itself and the calling and the chafing against it and each other. That the Jossverse has prophecies that undoubtedly come true, no matter what one does to avoid or change them, informs me that there is a greater power of *some sort* in that universe--that things don't just toddle along but are orchestrated in some way by a power(s) that knows the future. TPTB. Therefore, Angel and Spike's Destinies are already set up, already in motion.

But prophecies don't tell us everything. They tell us just enough to make us want to try to control destiny but not enough to allow it. The lesson I learned from Sahjan and Connor was that nothing can stop a prophecy from happening, not even traveling through time and dimensions. It's all so Appointment in Samarra somehow. The Shanshu prophecy did happen/will happen. I don't know--we don't know--if it happened in that alley, and if it did, who it happened *to*.

On another level, the vid is about Angel and Spike's personal relationship. From the moment Spike thrusts his hand into the sunlight, he belongs to Angel. And Angel belongs to him--obligated to be his teacher, his Yoda. (And for the slashers among us, oh what an obligation! To lead him into deviance.

ANGELUS .... (looks at William, checking him out) So, instead of just feeding off of this William... you went and turned him into one of us. Another rooster in the henhouse.  
DRUSILLA You're not cross with me, are you?  
ANGELUS Cross? (grabs William's arm and holds it out into the ray of sunlight beaming through the closed curtains) Do you have any idea what it's like having nothing but women as travel companions, night in and night out?  
WILLIAM (angrily yanks his sizzling hand away from Angelus) Touch me again—  
ANGELUS Don't mistake me. I do love the ladies. It's just lately... I've been wondering...(holds his own fist in the beam of sunlight) what it'd be like...(watches his hand sizzle) to share the slaughter of innocents... with another man. (turns his hand over so the palm is in the light now; looks admiringly at it as it smokes) Don't... don't think that makes me some kind of a deviant, hmm? (pulls his hand back close to his face) Do you?  
Staring at Angelus, William sticks his own hand in the light—voluntarily this time)

 

"Touch me again." I think Angelus decided to read that as an invitation instead of a schoolboy threat.  
"to share the slaughter of innocents." When I first saw this episode, I heard the line as "to share the slaughter of innocence," and I still feel that way. Angelus slaughtered William's Spike's innocence with his (Spike's) full and lively cooperation. And look at them!!! they're kindred spirits!! Totally understanding each other there--or at least thinking they did, because after all, as Gertrude Stein tells us, "clarity is of no importance because nobody listens and nobody knows what you mean no matter what you mean..." )

Angelus and William share a carriage, and William intimates that Dru is his Destiny. A romantic notion, not really befitting a vampire. Angelus looks William over. Angelus is *evil*, devious, sadistic, and bigger. Vampires aren't just evil to humans; they're evil to each other. He totally sets William up, so that when he finally makes it back home, he "surprises" Angelus and Dru. William thinks that Dru belongs to him. I don't think Dru ever considered it that way at all, and it was a horrible deflowering of William's innocence. Not a chipping away but a tearing away. And Angelus gives William the great truth that really applies to everyone all the time:

ANGELUS Just don't get it now, do you?(picks William up by the lapels, throwing him onto the couch) (pushes the corpses off the couch and sits beside William) Well, you're new... and a little dim. So let me explain to you how things are now. There's no belonging or deserving anymore. You can take what you want, have what you want... but nothing is yours.(Drusilla walks out into the doorway) Not even her. 

 

When Angel went to Sunnydale with the amulet, I believe that he intended to wear it. He described it to Buffy ("possibly ... scrubbing bubbles...") and its requirements ("ensouled but stronger than human..."), and Buffy sent him on his way, replacing him with Spike, officially letting Angel know that Spike was a trusted lieutenant and "in her heart."

Angel thought Spike was gone in the destruction of the hellmouth, so why (he rationalizes) tell anyone about the soul thing? When the amulet drops to the floor and Spike rides the whirlwind back into existence, the first thing he sees is... Angel, and he thinks he's in hell, and he makes for Angel like a shot. Of course, he's not in hell; he's in LA, which complicates things more than hell ever could.

For one thing, Angel, because he's Angel and has the market cornered on guilt, feels guilty about Spike's death in Sunnydale and probably feels guilty about their unsouled lives together and certainly feels guilty about not coming clean with the others about Spike's real role in the closing of the Hellmouth, soul and all.

FRED I don't know. He just... (looks at Angel) What did he mean, "saving the world"?  
ANGEL Oh, that—well—Buffy did most of the work. Well, he helped...

and

SPIKE You brought that bloody amulet to Sunnydale. You would have been the one to use it, until you chickened out.  
ANGEL What did you—  
SPIKE (incensed) You heard me! You left town in the nick of time, didn't you, before the death and mayhem? Abandoned the woman you claimed to love.  
ANGEL She made the call. Wasn't my choice.  
SPIKE And this, bloody hell, wasn't mine. I'm not you. I don't give a piss about atonement or destiny. Just because I got me a soul doesn't mean I'm gonna let myself be led around by—  
FRED E-excuse me?  
WESLEY Did—did you just say— Spike has a soul? (to Angel) You never said.  
ANGEL Didn't seem worth mentioning, you know.  
GUNN (frowns) Seems to be a lot of that.

 

Spike haunts Angel. There's a literal haunting going on in S5, which is the metaphor for what's really happening. Spike does haunt Angel. I think that Penn was Angel's prototypical protoge' and Spike is the floor model. On the other hand, Angel is incensed that Spike seems to have dealt with over 100 years of rampant, merry, demonic evil by spending a few months in a basement, and he feels that Spike hasn't had the epiphany, the conviction of his own guilt. (And he's right. That's why Damage was such an integral episode. The revelation cost Spike his hands.)

When he becomes corporeal, the first person Spike touches is Angel, and in that touch, he remembers. Angel remembers. (What we were informs all that we become) Angel is puzzled, repulsed, disbelieving that Spike is good. He doesn't want a partner or a sidekick. He wants to be special. He's shocked that Spike would take a shot at him when they kill Hainsley. Spike laughs like a child. (Angel's always surprised when Spike makes a play to be the big dog. I think that's sort of stupid of him, but we are sometimes blind to the strength of the motivations of those closest to us.)

When Angel and Spike finally clash in the operahouse, Spike violently reminds Angel of the lesson Angel forgot--that you can have what you want, take what you want, but nothing is yours. Not even that Cup. They speak horrible truths to each other--about Buffy, about their own evil.

SPIKE (punches Angel) 'Cause every time you look at me...(punches Angel) you see all the dirty little things I've done,(punches Angel) all the lives I've taken...(punches Angel) because of you! Drusilla sired me...(punches Angel) but you... you made me a monster.(punches Angel, walks toward the cup)  
ANGEL (collapses to the ground) I didn't make you, Spike. I just opened up the door...(starts to get up) and let the real you out.

Spike picks up the cross that burned Angel before and swings it at Angel, knocking him across the room. Spike holds the cross in his hands.  
SPIKE You never knew the real me.(hands sizzle on the cross; he throws it away; walks toward Angel) Too busy trying to see your own reflection... praying there was someone as disgusting as you in the world, so you could stand to live with yourself. Take a long look, hero. I'm nothing like you!  
ANGEL No. You're less. That's why Buffy never really loved you: Because you weren't me.  
SPIKE (grabs Angel by the lapels) Guess that means she was thinking about you... all those times I was puttin' it to her.

 

Angel painfully realizes that nothing is guaranteed to him, not Buffy, not the Shanshu, and his petty games of oneupsmanship (in the name of teaching a lesson heh) have come back to bite him because even having a soul can't dim the antipathy Spike holds for him. (Sort of a "the sins of the fathers are visited upon the sons who turn around and visit it right *back*) Spike, not really knowing what the Shanshu prophecy is (and who knows what anything is really? Because a thing is what it is what it is), just wants to make Angel feel that same sense of desolation that he felt all those years ago, and he drinks from the Cup, effectively stealing Angel's (taken for granted) Destiny. To Angel's horror. The fact that it isn't the real Destiny is irrelevant. Angel and Spike are on equal footing now, as far as *that* Destiny goes.

After the fight at the operahouse, they both look at each other warily, with new eyes.

Spike knows Angel. He knows all of Angel. The ensouled Spike, after Damage, really knows Angel--the horrors of remorse and repentance and knowing that you can't undo the damage that you've done. The only thing you can do is move forward and try not to do it again. Spike knows Angel (as well as he can know anything, because nobody ever really knows anybody and they are what they are what they are) and Angel knows Spike. Angel knows that Spike truly has a soul and a Destiny, and he feels great compassion for him. And because Angel knows Spike (see above), they are entwined. Their destinies are entwined--as much as destinies can be entwined because what is Destiny other than knowing to completeness? They are rivals now, not enemies.

By the time they get to England (their home, their past, their beginning), they've become a single-celled organism, and they're better and stronger together than apart. By the time they get to Italy, there are only remnants of their previous attitudes towards each other, because intimacy can come with enough knowledge, one person to another, and they know what they think they know and they mean what they think they mean, and they understand and believe what they think they understand and believe about each other, which, in turn grows into trust. In the alley, Spike turns and looks at Angel (sire/rival/enemy/brother/yoda/bloody poof/date) and sees Angel face his Destiny, and thus, Spike faces his.

One of the things I did in Roseability was always to put Spike on the left and Angel on the right--except for two specific instances--when Spike walks away to take the Cup and when Spike raises his hand to join Angel against the Circle of the Black Thorn. Both of those clips show a revelation and understanding of each by the other. When Spike walks away, Angel realizes that the Destiny he took for granted may never be his, and when Spike raises his hand, Spike realizes that his Destiny has always been with Angel. They've both come around to each other's way of thinking, the best way they could, because they agree that they think they know what they mean. To each other.

*Roseability - Idlewild

Rose, ability. There is no roseability  
Rose, ability. There is no roseability

You’ve got off with too much now  
You’re getting off with too much now  
Stop looking through scrapbooks and photograph albums  
Because I know  
They don’t teach you what you don’t already know  
You’ve always been, dissatisfied

Gertrude Stein said “That’s enough”  
(I know that that’s not enough now)

Rose, ability.  
There is no roseability

And that's what I have to say about that! *g*


End file.
